It’s almost impossible now to have an old-fashioned debate on any topic without words being twisted to suit the narrative.

If a female politician is criticised for a blunder, it must be because her critics are sexists or misogynists and not because she’s useless.

If a taoiseach who is gay is crucified for his performance, there must be an undercurrent of homophobic hostility.

If you hold on to the Stone Age views that male and female toilets should be separate, you’re a transphobe.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for two years.

I am blue in the face (to anyone whose face is blue, I mean no offence) complaining about some people’s unwillingness to hear out another point of view. I still fear that net warriors will drive someone to suicide.

When anyone asks me where I stand on a particular issue, I’m usually neutral as I’m neither liberal nor conservative, not left nor right. On that basis I really have no business writing a column.
But neutral to some is as bad as being vehemently against them — just as it was for mass murderers Benito Mussolini and Vladmir Lenin.

These Twitter bigots would drive a man to the margins.

There’s the Repeal the Eighth thing that to some is the most important vote we’ll ever have and to others is just noise.

That’s a fact — some people couldn’t care less one way or another, to the absolute fury of the Repealers who think we should all obsess over it.

How many, I wonder, will vote no as a ‘screw you’ to these liberal hardliners?

How many will deliver a petty, spiteful and counter-productive protest vote against all those who try to stifle free speech with threats and web shaming?

It would be fairly ironic if the Repeal vote was defeated, in part, by the very crew who are trying to ram their views down everyone’s necks.

Twitter is not a reflection of the real world, and for that I give thanks.

If it was, we’d all be scared witless to say anything at all lest we be torn to pieces.

It is no doubt genuinely disturbing to be on the receiving end of the baying mob’s fury. It’s unbridled hatred, unleashed.

Where are the liberal values in that?

Callan a national lampoon

OLIVER Callan’s take on Paschal Donohoe is brilliantly on the money.

The satirist has every little mannerism down to a fine art, including his lisp.